Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

What happens when you take your strange summer job, your grandfather’s escape from Hitler, and a little bit of Spanish, and you put them in the same backyard?

If you’re playwright Catherine Trieschmann, you get a new play.

One House Over, Geva Theatre Center’s third world-premiere play this season, is on the Wilson Stage through April 29. It’s part of a co-production, coming to Geva after a run at Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

“I always say writing a play is a bit like creating a recipe from scratch,” says Trieschmann, who was last seen at Geva workshopping her play The Dust People in their 2017 Festival of New Theatre. “I take these different ingredients and mix them up together and hopefully the play tells me what it wants to be about as I write it.”

Her first ingredient: The summer she spent as a nanny after meeting a woman on an airplane and agreeing to be her live-in help.

In many ways, her employer treated her poorly — for example, promising her a room she could stay in, then having her sleep on the couch. “On the other hand, we would have long dinners and drink wine together and she treated me like a best friend,” Trischemann recalls.

The “strange sort of relationship” with this woman led her to think about issues of boundaries when employers live with hired help.

Her other ingredients were two immigration stories: Her grandfather fled Czechoslovakia after Hitler’s invasion in 1939, and her neighbor friend left Mexico City in the 1990s.

“I think it’s very interesting that we tend to have a lot of emotional connection to our own immigrant ancestors but perhaps not always to people who are not from our own genealogy,” she says. “I want us to think about why we accept some and not others — what we fear about some immigrants and what we don’t fear in others.”

These inspirations come together in One House Over, a play in which two Mexican immigrants move in to help a white woman take care of her cantankerous father.

Zoë Sophia Garcia, who plays Camila Hernandez, says she appreciates that the play avoids stereotyping or idealizing its blue-collar Mexican immigrant characters without shying away from some of the challenges that Latino immigrants face.

“Camila makes sense to me,” she says. “There are certain characters that you click with, and she’s one.”

Like the playwright, Garcia looked to her grandparents’ immigration story (in her case, their journey from Cuba) to get in touch with her character.

“My grandparents did the American dream … but there was a loss of home. The plan was to come here, to escape what was going on in Cuba, then to get their country back and to go home. And it never happened. And it’s heartbreaking. So I relate that with Camila. She wants to go home.”

One of her favorite parts of the show for her has been the inclusion of a different language. She estimates a third of her lines are integrated with Spanish or Spanglish. Although many in her family speak Spanish, she never fully picked it up.

“I’m terrible at Spanish,” she says. “(This play) is making me tap into a part of myself that I want to grow in, to learn more and work on with myself.”

The play has also made her reflect on the challenges faced by undocumented immigrants.

“My hope is for folks to just listen and take pause on making judgments,” Garcia says. She says she often sees people oversimplify immigration issues when they forget “you’re talking about real people.”

Despite featuring immigrant characters, she says the play isn’t preachy, and it doesn’t claim to have answers. “It just introduces characters and their circumstances and the situations that arise through their interactions.” The very funny situations, she adds.

The comedy came as a surprise to the playwright, who was shocked by the laughs the play got when she first saw it in front of an audience. People particularly responded to Milos, played by Mark Jacoby.

“I thought he’d be sort of funny,” Trieschmann says. “I had no idea he’d really bring down the house.”

In retrospect, the response makes sense, considering her inspiration for the outspoken old man.

“My grandfather was kinder and gentler and didn’t create as much dramatic conflict. But he had a really big personality and I could sort of hear his voice in my head as I wrote,” she says.

“My family came to see the play and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, that is Grandpa.’ I’ve never done that before, actually — I’ve never just plopped a relative or friend into a play like that. But he’s dead so there’s nothing he can do about it,” she adds wryly.

“I’m happy with how often people laugh in this show,” Garcia says. “And that lessons are learned through laughter.”

Katherine Varga writes about the arts.

If You Go:

What:One House Over.

When: through April 29.

Where: Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

Tickets: Starting at $25. Available at the Box Office by calling (585) 232-4382 or online at gevatheatre.org.